


hello darkness my old friend

by fireflyslove



Series: Sound of Silence [2]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Eddie is a sad lad, Other, Reunions, Schmoop, Venom is a pronoun nightmare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 17:19:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17881988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyslove/pseuds/fireflyslove
Summary: Eddie had a history of falling in love hard and fast, but three days was a new record even for him. Especially given that Venom had literally been eating him for part of it. It felt foolish to miss something he only barely knew the first thing about, but logic had never been Eddie’s strong suit.(Or, Eddie's not doing well since Venom died. Eddie's half of what happened during 'that I might reach you')





	hello darkness my old friend

**Author's Note:**

> The aforementioned Eddie POV, now with more fluff!
> 
> I don't even want to talk about Venom and personal pronouns anymore.
> 
> Title, still, from The Sound of Silence. Get it? Because Venom is dark?

Eddie blacked out as soon as he hit the water. Having Venom torn from him by Riot’s claws, being stabbed by Riot, probably dying before being forcibly revived by Venom, blowing up a spaceship, and then having Venom sacrifice himself for Eddie (and in the process severing their bond again) was overwhelming enough, nevermind the slap of icy black water.

In the days that follow, he rather wishes he had stayed blacked out. The hospital staff (led by Dan, because of course) put him through a bevy of tasks that reveal… not much. A low level of phenethylamine, but nothing a few weeks of supplements can’t solve.

So he goes back to his apartment, holes in the walls clumsily patched by his landlord, and sits on the couch for what feels like a week. Eventually his stomach gets the better of him, and he eats. He showers, and goes to bed for another week or so. When he emerges, a glance at his phone tells him it’s only been two days, but the thing’s probably a lying piece of crap.

Somehow, though, the days roll by, one into another. He gets a job here and there, puff pieces mostly, interviews with hometown heroes. Everyone seems to want to take advantage of his newly reinvigorated public image. Before he knows it, it’s been a month.

His phone dings with a text, and he’s not surprised to see it’s from Anne. She’s been checking up on him of late. It’s rather sweet, actually. He doesn’t miss her the way he had before, it’s like a switch flipped in him and he doesn’t need her the way he used to.

(Eddie doesn’t let himself think of why that is, who he’s missing now, the goo-shaped space in his heart that’s empty. No, he doesn’t think of that. The freezer isn’t overflowing with tater tots for any other reason than they were on sale. And he’s always liked that chocolate. He’s perfectly. fine.)

Anne wants to have lunch. She usually does, and Eddie always comes up with an excuse for it. He’s typing one in when a knock on his door sounds. They don’t bother waiting for him to answer, and the landlord had never fixed the lock, so they just let themselves in. It’s Anne, and she’s carrying a large brown bag.

Eddie’s stomach grumbles.

“You look like shit,” she says without preamble.

“Nice to see you too, Annie,” he replies, but runs a hand through his admittedly greasy hair.

They eat and talk about inane things like Dan’s socks, Anne’s hairdresser, and Eddie’s growing pile of dirty dishes. They don’t talk about what Eddie knows Anne wants to talk about, and she’s too nice to bring it up, at least yet. When she’d come to take him home from the hospital, given that he didn’t have the money for a cab or an Uber and Dan wasn’t about to let him ride away on his bike, he’d told her about Venom. She had been his host for a short time, so she understood, after a fashion, but Eddie didn’t think she truly got the depth of the attachment he had formed with the symbiote.

It had only been a few days, but it had felt like coming home in a way that even Anne had never felt. Eddie had a history of falling in love hard and fast, but three days was a new record even for him. Especially given that Venom had literally been eating him for part of it. It felt foolish to miss something he only barely knew the first thing about, but logic had never been Eddie’s strong suit.

Anne leaves, and leaves leftovers for him. She’s too kind, really.

Eddie considers the pile of empty beer bottles in the recycling bin, and grimaces. He grabs a handful of fun-sized candies, shoves them in the pocket of his hoodie, and turns Netflix on. He’s been watching _Nailed It_ on repeat, hoping the bad cakes will put him in a good mood. It’s been marginally effective.

Sleep is unsurprisingly elusive these days, and when he does sleep, it’s filled with dreams of burning skies and seas filled with dark goo.

Two weeks after his lunch with Anne, Eddie gets a text from his ex, with whom he’d parted ways amicably a few months before he’d met Anne. Jeremy just opened a club with his husband a few blocks down from Eddie’s apartment and he wants Eddie to come down. Without much to do, and with Netflix’s “are you ok?” messages starting to get concerning, Eddie agrees.

He doesn’t dress up much, intending to stay near the bar and get rather spectacularly smashed, but he does put on a fresh hoodie for the occasion. When he arrives, Jeremy lets him in the back door. It’s loud and dark inside, with bodies packed nearly wall to wall. There’s a dizzying array of people, from a woman wearing what seems to be a series of strategically placed scarves to a person in sparkly red pants with a bow the size of a small child on the hip.

Eddie takes up residence at one end of the bar and nurses a surprisingly good selection of beers, watching the people on the dance floor do something that was a cousin of dancing. He rebuffs a few amorous advances in the first hour, but by the third hour, he’s feeling just a little buzz, and when a half-decent man with a rather impressive set of muscles approaches him, Eddie’s feeling frisky.

One night stands in seedy nightclubs aren’t his usual thing, but if you had asked him seven weeks ago whether he’d willingly play host to sentient goo, well, things changed quickly.

The man, Eddie never does catch his name, drags him onto the dancefloor, and immediately sets to dry-humping him. He’s evidently much more experienced at this than Eddie, and when the man leans in to whisper in his ear, “You wanna take this somewhere more private?”, he actually gives Eddie a chance to nod in the affirmative before pulling him by the hand out to the alley behind the club.

The man has him pressed up against the nightclub, and Eddie’s dick is showing interest in something for the first time in six weeks. (Except for that one time in the shower, but… He’s not thinking about Venom, he’s _not_ thinking about Venom.) And then all of a sudden, the man is stumbling back, a troubled look on his face.

“You all right, man?” Eddie asked.

“Just not feelin it dude, sorry,” the man said.

Eddie doesn’t get anything else out before the man is off like a shot, and disappears down the alley. Eddie isn’t mad, exactly, the man’s well within his rights to stop at any point, but this had been the guy’s idea. So now Eddie’s horny and sad, and rather than going back in, he decides to go home. Maybe he can jerk one out in the shower. (And continue to not think about Venom)

He shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and mutters “Well fuck me, I guess.”. He kicks a rock at the wall, and it bounces off, clanging against the dumpster.

The walk home is uneventful, and Eddie’s left stewing in his own thoughts. By the time he reaches his apartment, he’s not horny anymore, just exhausted, so he kicks his shoes off and goes to his bed, flopping down onto his face before giving a deep groan.

He’s so _lonely_. Even Anne (and occasionally Dan) visiting does very little to interrupt his mostly solitary life, and what Eddie wouldn’t do for some companionship. He should get a dog. Or a cat. Cats were better. A black cat. He loved the pictures of black cats with their eyes where it just looked like they were a void.

Yeah, a black void with bright eyes. And teeth. Sharp, white teeth.

He almost didn’t notice the sensation of something in his hoodie pocket moving until it suddenly flattened under his weight. He jumps up and away from the bed, inexplicably expecting the remains of a water balloon on his bed, but there was nothing there. Instead, his hoodie pocket seemed to have come to life.

He had backed into the wall, and cautiously flicked the light on before mustering the courage to look in the pocket. There was no water balloon, but instead an inky black lump. It took Eddie a full ten seconds to process what he was seeing.

“Venom?” he asks in a whisper. He really hoped this wasn’t sleep deprivation getting to him finally.

A thin tendril extends from the blob, and Eddie reaches in to scoop the symbiote out. It’s small, fitting comfortably in his cupped hands and Eddie wants nothing more than to keep him inside his skin where nothing could ever hurt him again. His eyes prickle with the beginning of tears, and he chokes out, ““V, I thought you were dead.”

Venom forms two small opalescent eyes, and squints up at Eddie.

Eddie tries to ask Venom how he got here, but coherency escapes him, and instead he just presses his face into Venom’s inky surface. A frisson passes over his skin as Venom seeps through, and something in Eddie’s chest settles as the symbiote moves through his body. It should horrify him, a deeply wrong feeling of something moving inside him, but instead it settles the faint nausea he’s had for the last month and a half, and more importantly, his heartache.

It’s a long moment after Venom settles until he does something, and Eddie waits breathlessly.

**_Hungry_ **

Eddie spends the next fifteen minutes inhaling chocolate, and silently berating himself for not going to look for Venom. A series of hosts. _Six weeks_ he had left his ( _his_ ) symbiote out there in the world, starving.

Venom forming a hand for him to clasp is surprising, but almost intoxicatingly pleasant, and Eddie distantly notes how nice the shimmer of black over his skin looks. Soon, too soon, Venom runs out of energy, and has to retreat, but he takes extra effort to reassure Eddie that he’s still there, sitting in Eddie’s chest, where Eddie can keep him safe and protected.

-

Eddie wakes in a cold sweat, sitting bolt upright. The dreams of fiery skies and inky seas had returned, and Eddie’s disoriented when he opens his eyes to find himself alone in his apartment.

Only… no, he isn’t alone, is he?

A quick glance down shows nothing externally, but he swears he can feel the symbiote resting somewhere around his spine, _purring._

“Venom?” he asks out loud, never yet having gotten the hang of thinking with enough intent for Venom to hear him.

**_Eddie,_** the symbiote replies. **_Good morning._**

“You sleep well?” Eddie asks, swinging his feet out of the bed and padding over to the bathroom.

**_You have troubling night-thoughts_** Venom says as Eddie attends to his morning business. **_Why?_**

“They’re called dreams,” Eddie says. “And, well, it’s been a rough six weeks.”

**_Six weeks?_ **Venom asks.

“That’s how long I thought you were dead.”

**_You mourned us._ **

“Of course I did.”

The purring intensifies. **_We missed you as well. But we are back. And we will not leave, not even if you want us to_ ** **.**

“No!” Eddie shouts this, realizing perhaps too late that it was rather loud for this early in the morning. “No,” he says again, more quietly. “Never again.”

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found on an internet near you @fireflyslove
> 
> Ok continuing to not promise anything, but my muse is currently trying to talk me into tentacle smut so that might be a thing that happens. I also have plans for the worst hurt/comfort fic I've ever conceived, complete with Eddie and Venom being ripped apart because I am RUDE and ENJOY CAUSING PAIN. (But I'm also a two trick pony, and one of those tricks is reunions/"hey I'm not dead!"s, as you can probably tell from uh... most of my fic. Back in the Maybe Baby and This Love/Treach/S&S days, it was practically a tradition to kill someone off every 10k words or so.)


End file.
